THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 10

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ROBERT BURNS 10

While Scotland was disgraced by sordidly allowing her brightest genius

to descend to the plough and the excise, the poet hastened his

departure from a city which had witnessed both his triumph and his

shame: he bade farewell in a few well-chosen words to such of the

classic literati--the Blairs, the Stewarts, the Mackenzies, and the

Tytlers--as had welcomed the rustic bard and continued to countenance

him; while in softer accents he bade adieu to the Clarindas and

Chlorises of whose charms he had sung, and, having wrung a settlement

from Creech, he turned his steps towards Mossgiel and Mauchline. He

had several reasons, and all serious ones, for taking Ayrshire in his

way to the Nith: he desired to see his mother, his brothers and

sisters, who had partaken of his success, and were now raised from

pining penury to comparative affluence: he desired to see those who

had aided him in his early struggles into the upper air--perhaps

those, too, who had looked coldly on, and smiled at his outward

aspirations after fame or distinction; but more than all, he desired

to see one whom he once and still dearly loved, who had been a

sufferer for his sake, and whom he proposed to make mistress of his

fireside and the sharer of his fortunes. Even while whispering of love

to Charlotte Hamilton, on the banks of the Devon, or sighing out the

affected sentimentalities of platonic or pastoral love in the ear of

Clarinda, his thoughts wandered to her whom he had left bleaching her

webs among the daisies on Mauchline braes--she had still his heart,

and in spite of her own and her father's disclamation, she was his

wife. It was one of the delusions of this great poet, as well as of

those good people, the Armours, that the marriage had been dissolved

by the destruction of the marriage-lines, and that Robert Burns and

Jean Armour were as single as though they had neither vowed nor

written themselves man and wife. Be that as it may, the time was come

when all scruples and obstacles were to be removed which stood in the

way of their union: their hands were united by Gavin Hamilton,

according to law, in April, 1788: and even the Reverend Mr. Auld, so

mercilessly lampooned, smiled forgivingly as the poet satisfied a

church wisely scrupulous regarding the sacred ceremony of marriage.

 

Though Jean Armour was but a country lass of humble degree, she had

sense and intelligence, and personal charms sufficient not only to win

and fix the attentions of the poet, but to sanction the praise which

he showered on her in song. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, he thus

describes her: "The most placid good nature and sweetness of

disposition, a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to

love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the

best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure: these I think

in a woman may make a good wife, though she should never have read a

page but the scriptures, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than

a penny-pay wedding." To the accomplished Margaret Chalmers, of

Edinburgh, he adds, to complete the picture, "I have got the

handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and

kindest heart in the country: a certain late publication of Scots'

poems she has perused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the land,

as she has the finest wood-note wild you ever heard." With his young

wife, a punch bowl of Scottish marble, and an eight-day clock, both

presents from Mr. Armour, now reconciled to his eminent son-in-law,

with a new plough, and a beautiful heifer, given by Mrs. Dunlop, with

about four hundred pounds in his pocket, a resolution to toil, and a

hope of success, Burns made his appearance on the banks of the Nith,

and set up his staff at Ellisland. This farm, now a classic spot, is

about six miles up the river from Dumfries; it extends to upwards of a

hundred acres: the soil is kindly; the holmland portion of it loamy

and rich, and it has at command fine walks on the river side, and

views of the Friar's Carse, Cowehill, and Dalswinton. For a while the

poet had to hide his head in a smoky hovel; till a house to his fancy,

and offices for his cattle and his crops were built, his accommodation

was sufficiently humble; and his mind taking its hue from his

situation, infused a bitterness into the letters in which he first

made known to his western friends that he had fixed his abode in

Nithsdale. "I am here," said he, "at the very elbow of existence: the

only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity

and canting; prose they only know in graces and prayers, and the value

of these they estimate as they do their plaiden-webs, by the ell: as

for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a

poet." "This is an undiscovered clime," he at another period exclaims,

"it is unknown to poetry, and prose never looked on it save in drink.

I sit by the fire, and listen to the hum of the spinning-wheel: I

hear, but cannot see it, for it is hidden in the smoke which eddies

round and round me before it seeks to escape by window and door. I

have no converse but with the ignorance which encloses me: No kenned

face but that of my old mare, Jenny Geddes--my life is dwindled down

to mere existence."

 

When the poet's new house was built and plenished, and the atmosphere

of his mind began to clear, he found the land to be fruitful, and its

people intelligent and wise. In Riddel, of Friar's Carse, he found a

scholar and antiquarian; in Miller, of Dalswinton, a man conversant

with science as well as with the world; in M'Murdo, of Drumlanrig, a

generous and accomplished gentleman; and in John Syme, of Ryedale, a

man much after his own heart, and a lover of the wit and socialities

of polished life. Of these gentlemen Riddel, who was his neighbour,

was the favourite: a door was made in the march-fence which separated

Ellisland from Friar's Carse, that the poet might indulge in the

retirement of the Carse hermitage, a little lodge in the wood, as

romantic as it was beautiful, while a pathway was cut through the

dwarf oaks and birches which fringed the river bank, to enable the

poet to saunter and muse without lot or interruption. This attention

was rewarded by an inscription for the hermitage, written with

elegance as well as feeling, and which was the first fruits of his

fancy in this unpoetic land. In a happier strain he remembered Matthew

Henderson: this is one of the sweetest as well as happiest of his

poetic compositions. He heard of his friend's death, and called on

nature animate and inanimate, to lament the loss of one who held the

patent of his honours from God alone, and who loved all that was pure

and lovely and good. "The Whistle" is another of his Ellisland

compositions: the contest which he has recorded with such spirit and

humour took place almost at his door: the heroes were Fergusson, of

Craigdarroch, Sir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelltown, and Riddel, of the

Friar's Carse: the poet was present, and drank bottle and bottle about

with the best, and when all was done he seemed much disposed, as an

old servant at Friar's Carse remembered, to take up the victor.

 

Burns had become fully reconciled to Nithsdale, and was on the most

intimate terms with the muse when he produced Tam O' Shanter, the

crowning glory of all his poems. For this marvellous tale we are

indebted to something like accident: Francis Grose, the antiquary,

happened to visit Friar's Carse, and as he loved wine and wit, the

total want of imagination was no hinderance to his friendly

intercourse with the poet: "Alloway's auld haunted kirk" was

mentioned, and Grose said he would include it in his illustrations of

the antiquities of Scotland, if the bard of the Doon would write a

poem to accompany it. Burns consented, and before he left the table,

the various traditions which belonged to the ruin were passing through

his mind. One of these was of a farmer, who, on a night wild with

wind and rain, on passing the old kirk was startled by a light

glimmering inside the walls; on drawing near he saw a caldron hung

over a fire, in which the heads and limbs of children were simmering:

there was neither witch nor fiend to guard it, so he unhooked the

caldron, turned out the contents, and carried it home as a trophy. A

second tradition was of a man of Kyle, who, having been on a market

night detained late in Ayr, on crossing the old bridge of Doon, on his

way home, saw a light streaming through the gothic window of Alloway

kirk, and on riding near, beheld a batch of the district witches

dancing merrily round their master, the devil, who kept them "louping

and flinging" to the sound of a bagpipe. He knew several of the old

crones, and smiled at their gambols, for they were dancing in their

smocks: but one of them, and she happened to be young and rosy, had on

a smock shorter than those of her companions by two spans at least,

which so moved the farmer that he exclaimed, "Weel luppan, Maggie wi'

the short sark!" Satan stopped his music, the light was extinguished,

and out rushed the hags after the farmer, who made at the gallop for

the bridge of Doon, knowing that they could not cross a stream: he

escaped; but Maggie, who was foremost, seized his horse's tail at the

middle of the bridge, and pulled it off in her efforts to stay him.

 

This poem was the work of a single day: Burns walked out to his

favourite musing path, which runs towards the old tower of the Isle,

along Nithside, and was observed to walk hastily and mutter as he

went. His wife knew by these signs that he was engaged in composition,

and watched him from the window; at last wearying, and moreover

wondering at the unusual length of his meditations, she took her

children with her and went to meet him; but as he seemed not to see

her, she stept aside among the broom to allow him to pass, which he

did with a flushed brow and dropping eyes, reciting these lines

aloud:--

 

"Now Tam! O, Tum! had thae been queans,

A' plump and strapping in their teens,

Their sacks, instead o' creeshie flannen,

Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!

Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,

That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair,

I wad hae gien them off my hurdies,

For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies!"

 

He embellished this wild tradition from fact as well as from fancy:

along the road which Tam came on that eventful night his memory

supplied circumstances which prepared him for the strange sight at the

kirk of Alloway. A poor chapman had perished, some winters before, in

the snow; a murdered child had been found by some early hunters; a

tippling farmer had fallen from his horse at the expense of his neck,

beside a "meikle stane"; and a melancholy old woman had hanged herself

at the bush aboon the well, as the poem relates: all these matters the

poet pressed into the service of the muse, and used them with a skill

which adorns rather than oppresses the legend. A pert lawyer from

Dumfries objected to the language as obscure: "Obscure, sir!" said

Burns; "you know not the language of that great master of your own

art--the devil. If you had a witch for your client you would not be

able to manage her defence!"

 

He wrote few poems after his marriage, but he composed many songs: the

sweet voice of Mrs. Burns and the craving of Johnson's Museum will in

some measure account for the number, but not for their variety, which

is truly wonderful. In the history of that mournful strain, "Mary in

Heaven," we read the story of many of his lyrics, for they generally

sprang from his personal feelings: no poet has put more of himself

into his poetry than Burns, "Robert, though ill of a cold," said his

wife, "had been busy all day--a day of September, 1789, with the

shearers in the field, and as he had got most of the corn into the

stack-yard, was in good spirits; but when twilight came he grew sad

about something, and could not rest: he wandered first up the

waterside, and then went into the stack-yard: I followed, and begged

him to come into the house, as he was ill, and the air was sharp and

cold. He said, 'Ay, ay,' but did not come: he threw himself down on

some loose sheaves, and lay looking at the sky, and particularly at a

large, bright star, which shone like another moon. At last, but that

was long after I had left him, he came home--the song was already

composed." To the memory of Mary Campbell he dedicated that touching

ode; and he thus intimates the continuance of his early affection for

"The fair haired lass of the west," in a letter of that time to Mrs.

Dunlop. "If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the

benevolent, the amiable, and the humane. What a flattering idea, then,

is a world to come! There shall I, with speechless agony of rapture,

again recognise my lost, my ever dear Mary, whose bosom was fraught

with truth, honour, constancy, and love." These melancholy words gave

way in their turn to others of a nature lively and humorous: "Tam

Glen," in which the thoughts flow as freely as the waters of the Nith,

on whose banks he wrote it; "Findlay," with its quiet vein of sly

simplicity; "Willie brewed a peck o' maut," the first of social, and

"She's fair and fause," the first of sarcastic songs, with "The deil's

awa wi' the Exciseman," are all productions of this period--a period

which had besides its own fears and its own forebodings.

 

For a while Burns seemed to prosper in his farm: he held the plough

with his own hand, he guided the harrows, he distributed the seed-corn

equally among the furrows, and he reaped the crop in its season, and

saw it safely covered in from the storms of winter with "thack and

rape;" his wife, too, superintended the dairy with a skill which she

had brought from Kyle, and as the harvest, for a season or two, was

abundant, and the dairy yielded butter and cheese for the market, it

seemed that "the luckless star" which ruled his lot had relented, and

now shone unboding and benignly. But much more is required than toil

of hand to make a successful farmer, nor will the attention bestowed

only by fits and starts, compensate for carelessness or oversight:

frugality, not in one thing but in all, is demanded, in small matters

as well as in great, while a careful mind and a vigilant eye must

superintend the labours of servants, and the whole system of in-door

and out-door economy. Now, during the three years which Burns stayed

in Ellisland, he neither wrought with that constant diligence which

farming demands, nor did he bestow upon it the unremitting attention

of eye and mind which such a farm required: besides his skill in

husbandry was but moderate--the rent, though of his own fixing, was

too high for him and for the times; the ground, though good, was not

so excellent as he might have had on the same estate--he employed more

servants than the number of acres demanded, and spread for them a

richer board than common: when we have said this we need not add the

expensive tastes induced by poetry, to keep readers from starting,

when they are told that Burns, at the close of the third year of

occupation, resigned his lease to the landlord, and bade farewell for

ever to the plough. He was not, however, quite desolate; he had for a

year or more been appointed on the excise, and had superintended a

district extending to ten large parishes, with applause; indeed, it

has been assigned as the chief reason for failure in his farm, that

when the plough or the sickle summoned him to the field, he was to be

found, either pursuing the defaulters of the revenue, among the

valleys of Dumfrieshire, or measuring out pastoral verse to the

beauties of the land. He retired to a house in the Bank-vennel of

Dumfries, and commenced a town-life: he commenced it with an empty

pocket, for Ellisland had swallowed up all the profits of his poems:

he had now neither a barn to produce meal nor barley, a barn-yard to

yield a fat hen, a field to which he could go at Martinmas for a mart,

nor a dairy to supply milk and cheese and butter to the table--he had,

in short, all to buy and little to buy with. He regarded it as a

compensation that he had no farm-rent to provide, no bankruptcies to

dread, no horse to keep, for his excise duties were now confined to

Dumfries, and that the burthen of a barren farm was removed from his

mind, and his muse at liberty to renew her unsolicited strains.

 

But from the day of his departure from "the barren" Ellisland, the

downward course of Burns may be dated. The cold neglect of his country

had driven him back indignantly to the plough, and he hoped to gain

from the furrowed field that independence which it was the duty of

Scotland to have provided: but he did not resume the plough with all

the advantages he possessed when he first forsook it: he had revelled

in the luxuries of polished life--his tastes had been rendered

expensive as well as pure: he had witnessed, and he hoped for the

pleasures of literary retirement, while the hands which had led

jewelled dames over scented carpets to supper tables leaded with

silver took hold of the hilts of the plough with more of reluctance

than good-will. Edinburgh, with its lords and its ladies, its delights

and its hopes, spoiled him for farming. Nor were his new labours more

acceptable to his haughty spirit than those of the plough: the excise

for a century had been a word of opprobrium or of hatred in the

north: the duties which it imposed were regarded, not by peasants

alone, as a serious encroachment upon the ancient rights of the

nation, and to mislead a gauger, or resist him, even to blood, was

considered by few as a fault. That the brightest genius of the

nation--one whose tastes and sensibilities were so peculiarly its

own--should be, as a reward, set to look after run-rum and smuggled

tobacco, and to gauge ale-wife's barrels, was a regret and a marvel to

many, and a source of bitter merriment to Burns himself.

 

The duties of his situation were however performed punctually, if not

with pleasure: he was a vigilant officer; he was also a merciful and

considerate one: though loving a joke, and not at all averse to a

dram, he walked among suspicious brewers, captious ale-wives, and

frowning shop-keepers as uprightly as courteously: he smoothed the

ruggedest natures into acquiescence by his gayety and humour, and yet

never gave cause for a malicious remark, by allowing his vigilance to

slumber. He was brave, too, and in the capture of an armed smuggler,

in which he led the attack, showed that he neither feared water nor

fire: he loved, also, to counsel the more forward of the smugglers to

abandon their dangerous calling; his sympathy for the helpless poor

induced him to give them now and then notice of his approach; he has

been known to interpret the severe laws of the excise into tenderness

and mercy in behalf of the widow and the fatherless. In all this he

did but his duty to his country and his kind: and his conduct was so

regarded by a very competent and candid judge. "Let me look at the

books of Burns," said Maxwell, of Terraughty, at the meeting of the

district magistrates, "for they show that an upright officer may be a

merciful one." With a salary of some seventy pounds a year, the chance

of a few guineas annually from the future editions of his poems, and

the hope of rising at some distant day to the more lucrative situation

of supervisor, Burns continued to live in Dumfries; first in the

Bank-vennel, and next in a small house in a humble street, since

called by his name.

 

In his earlier years the poet seems to have scattered songs as thick

as a summer eve scatters its dews; nor did he scatter them less

carelessly: he appears, indeed, to have thought much less of them than

of his poems: the sweet song of Mary Morison, and others not at all

inferior, lay unregarded among his papers till accident called them

out to shine and be admired. Many of these brief but happy

compositions, sometimes with his name, and oftener without, he threw

in dozens at a time into Johnson, where they were noticed only by the

captious Ritson: but now a work of higher pretence claimed a share in

his skill: in September, 1792, he was requested by George Thomson to

render, for his national collection, the poetry worthy of the muses of

the north, and to take compassion on many choice airs, which had

waited for a poet like the author of the Cotter's Saturday Night, to

wed them to immortal verse. To engage in such an undertaking, Burns

required small persuasion, and while Thomson asked for strains

delicate and polished, the poet characteristically stipulated that his

contributions were to be without remuneration, and the language

seasoned with a sprinkling of the Scottish dialect. As his heart was

much in the matter, he began to pour out verse with a readiness and

talent unknown in the history of song: his engagement with Thomson,

and his esteem for Johnson, gave birth to a series of songs as

brilliant as varied, and as naturally easy as they were gracefully

original. In looking over those very dissimilar collections it is not

difficult to discover that the songs which he wrote for the more

stately work, while they are more polished and elegant than those

which he contributed to the less pretending one, are at the same time

less happy in their humour and less simple in their pathos. "What

pleases _me_ as simple and naive," says Burns to Thomson, "disgusts

_you_ as ludicrous and low. For this reason 'Fye, gie me my coggie,

sirs,' 'Fye, let us a' to the bridal,' with several others of that

cast, are to me highly pleasing, while 'Saw ye my Father' delights me

with its descriptive simple pathos:" we read in these words the

reasons of the difference between the lyrics of the two collections.

 

The land where the poet lived furnished ready materials for song:

hills with fine woods, vales with clear waters, and dames as lovely as

any recorded in verse, were to be had in his walks and his visits;

while, for the purposes of mirth or of humour, characters, in whose

faces originality was legibly written, were as numerous in Nithsdale

as he had found them in the west. He had been reproached, while in

Kyle, with seeing charms in very ordinary looks, and hanging the

garlands of the muse on unlovely altars; he was liable to no such

censure in Nithsdale; he poured out the incense of poetry only on the

fair and captivating: his Jeans, his Lucys, his Phillises, and his

Jessies were ladies of such mental or personal charms as the

Reynolds's and the Lawrences of the time would have rejoiced to lay

out their choicest colours on. But he did not limit himself to the

charms of those whom he could step out to the walks and admire: his

lyrics give evidence of the wandering of his thoughts to the distant

or the dead--he loves to remember Charlotte Hamilton and Mary

Campbell, and think of the sighs and vows on the Devon and the Doon,

while his harpstrings were still quivering to the names of the Millers

and the M'Murdos--to the charms of the lasses with golden or with

flaxen locks, in the valley where he dwelt. Of Jean M'Murdo and her

sister Phillis he loved to sing; and their beauty merited his strains:

to one who died in her bloom, Lucy Johnston, he addressed a song of

great sweetness; to Jessie Lewars, two or three songs of gratitude and

praise: nor did he forget other beauties, for the accomplished Mrs.

Riddel is remembered, and the absence of fair Clarinda is lamented in

strains both impassioned and pathetic.

 

But the main inspirer of the latter songs of Burns was a young woman

of humble birth: of a form equal to the most exquisite proportions of

sculpture, with bloom on her cheeks, and merriment in her large bright

eyes, enough to drive an amatory poet crazy. Her name was Jean

Lorimer; she was not more than seventeen when the poet made her

acquaintance, and though she had got a sort of brevet-right from an

officer of the army, to use his southron name of Whelpdale, she loved

best to be addressed by her maiden designation, while the poet chose

to veil her in the numerous lyrics, to which she gave life, under the

names of "Chloris," "The lass of Craigie-burnwood," and "The lassie

wi' the lintwhite locks." Though of a temper not much inclined to

conceal anything, Burns complied so tastefully with the growing demand

of the age for the exterior decencies of life, that when the scrupling

dames of Caledonia sung a new song in her praise, they were as

unconscious whence its beauties came, as is the lover of art, that the

shape and gracefulness of the marble nymph which he admires, are

derived from a creature who sells the use of her charms indifferently

to sculpture or to love. Fine poetry, like other arts called fine,

springs from "strange places," as the flower in the fable said, when

it bloomed on the dunghill; nor is Burns more to be blamed than was

Raphael, who painted Madonnas, and Magdalens with dishevelled hair and

lifted eyes, from a loose lady, whom the pope, "Holy at Rome--here

Antichrist," charitably prescribed to the artist, while he laboured in

the cause of the church. Of the poetic use which he made of Jean

Lorimer's charms, Burns gives this account to Thomson. "The lady of

whom the song of Craigie-burnwood was made is one of the finest women

in Scotland, and in fact is to me in a manner what Sterne's Eliza was

to him--a mistress, or friend, or what you will, in the guileless

simplicity of platonic love. I assure you that to my lovely friend you

are indebted for many of my best songs. Do you think that the sober

gin-horse routine of my existence could inspire a man with life and

love and joy--could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos,

equal to the ge